1 86 THE WORLDS LUMBER ROOM. 



when, during time of flood, the great river rises forty or fifty 

 feet, the largest forest-trees are uprooted and hurried away. 



Enormous quantities of drift-wood are also carried into 

 the Gulf of Mexico, some of the trunks having travelled 

 1,000 miles down the Mississippi. No doubt also large 

 matted masses of plants, tree-ferns, &c, were carried down 

 by the rivers or washed away from the low jungle edge of 

 tropical islands, and either accumulated in estuaries or were 

 thrown up on the swampy shore or carried farther out to 

 sea. But wherever they accumulated at the bottom of sea, 

 lake, or swamp there, if the conditions were favourable, they 

 would be converted into coal. 



The same may be said of seaweeds ; for though no beds, 

 except some small ones in Iceland, can actually be proved 

 to be formed of them, yet seaweeds, as well as shells, are 

 found fossil in coal, and there is every reason to believe 

 that they have contributed to its formation, for we know 

 that the ocean teemed with inhabitants which must have 

 been fed as at the present day. 



There is one plant, however, which has contributed so 

 largely to the making of English coal that a few words 

 must be devoted to it. This is the common ground pine, or 

 club-moss, now an insignificant little plant only a few 

 inches, or at most two or three feet, high, the stems of 

 which are covered with little scale-like leaves and terminate 

 in spikes resembling fir-cones. Between the leaves of the 

 spikes are small round bags filled with fine dust, like the 

 pollen on the anthers of flowers, which consists of spores, 

 and is so resinous and inflammable that it has been used 

 in the preparation of fireworks. A pinch of this lycopo- 



